A spokesperson for the utility and energy company Ameren said in October it is a few months away from finishing the lengthy environmental cleanup of hazardous and carcinogenic pollutants in the Champaign neighborhood known as Fifth and Hill.
The site is at the intersection of Fifth and Hill streets in northeast Champaign.
CU-CitizenAccess.org has reported on the issue since 2011 and graduate students at the time developed an interactive map showing the history of the site and where chemicals ended up around the neighborhood.
Claudia Lennhoff, director of Champaign County Health Care Consumers, has been leading the Fifth and Hill neighborhood rights campaign for more than a decade.
The following interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.
CU-CitizenAccess: How long has there been a community effort to remove the contaminants from the neighborhood?
Claudia Lennhoff: It started in 2007 at the end of the year with a community meeting. We partnered with a professor and some graduate students who had done research and found that the site in the neighborhood was declared a toxic site.
We had gone door-to-door to invite people to the meeting and let them know about the information that we would be presenting. There were probably about 200 people at this meeting from the neighborhood. We had a whole presentation where we explained about the toxic site and how they found out about it.
Former manufactured gas plants have certain chemicals that are very consistent with their operations, and so they presented information about the types of toxic chemicals, and then the health conditions associated with exposure to those chemicals, and people were really in shock. They were really upset that they had never known about this. Even people who were aware of what had been there because they grew up there had no idea that they were living in a contaminated neighborhood.
And there was one really notable moment to me that still stands out. That was when information was being presented about the chemicals that are basically endocrine disruptors. Then one of my co-workers who had friends in the neighborhood, who had these problems, she started talking about the bleeding disorders that women were having. And when she said that, the room kind of erupted with private conversations where people started turning to each other and talking to each other. It was clear that so many families in that room had somebody who had had a female relative who had experienced these problems.
Then the meeting sort of culminated in us asking people if they wanted to organize around this, and the people said yes. We were very clear with people that we are not experts in environmental health and these kinds of issues, but that we knew how to do research, we knew how to work with people, and we would work together to figure out what’s going on, and then to figure out what the neighborhood could do to protect their rights. And that kicked off the community organizing campaign that Champaign County Health Care Consumers led.
CU-CitizenAccess: How’s your experience been in establishing this campaign?
Lennhoff: The campaign lasted for years and years. The people who we got to work with the leadership in Fifth and Hill among the residents were extraordinary. Unfortunately, many of them passed away, probably from illnesses that were associated with their exposure.
But we became like a family. We used to meet for years and years and years. We met twice a month at M.D. Pelmore’s home on Hill Street, right across from the toxic site. He was the patriarch of the Fifth and Hill neighborhood rights campaign. Him and this other gentleman named Ebbie Cook and Ebbie’s wife, Magnolia, and I, we became like family. We had so many battles as part of the campaign. We won some and we lost some but we became a really, really tight knit group.
This was old school organizing. We had to go door-to-door all the time to keep people updated, to invite them to meetings, to invite them to special events, to get them to sign petitions, things like that. We used phone trees to call people for meetings and for events. And the reason for that was because of the digital divide. A lot of people in the neighborhood didn’t have computers, didn’t use email. I’m obviously a white person and it was a predominantly Black neighborhood. It took a little while to establish trust, going and knocking on people’s doors.
We really tried to jump start the trust process. Andy Bloeser was the grad student who became an organizer with us. He’s also white. One of my co-workers, Paulette Coleman, she’s Black. She knew people in the neighborhood. So she went out with Andy, going door-to-door, and helped introduce him to people, because people knew her. Then after that, people started opening doors to Andy to come and talk to them. And he was so devoted. Every week he would be in the neighborhood. There were like three to four hundred homes that he would circulate through, door knocking, and then we would go with him whenever we could. And that was how we built that.
CU-CitizenAccess: What were your major concerns about how it affects the neighborhood? What were the neighborhood’s concerns?
Indoor vapor intrusion
Lennhoff: The major form of exposure to toxic chemicals for people living in the neighborhood is through indoor vapor intrusion. There’s certain chemicals that are spread throughout the neighborhood and beyond, through the movement of groundwater. We saw that you can map out the movement of groundwater to see which direction it’s moving in. If you think of the site as a target, the movement of groundwater was going out in every direction. The chemicals on the site are not uniform, so depending on what was happening on the northern part of the site, it might produce slightly different chemicals in different degrees than the southern part. Basically, some of these chemicals, when they’re exposed to air, they vaporize. Volatile organic compounds, benzene, for example. What would happen is, as the groundwater would move through the soil, the soil has pockets of air in it. And then the homes in the neighborhood, every home creates a vacuum. And then those vapors will circulate throughout the home.
One of the things that made these homes really susceptible to indoor vapor intrusion is that the neighborhood is very old, and a lot of the homes would flood. Groundwater would literally enter their basements. I saw flooding that was several feet deep in one person’s home. That home has been destroyed now, but a lot of the homes had dirt basements. And a lot of homes had wells or cisterns in their homes from back in the old days. What happened over time is people would cover up the wells, but a lot of times not properly. It’s groundwater coming in, and these chemicals can vaporize upward. And so to prevent that, you’re supposed to cap off the well with concrete. But most people couldn’t do that. And so what they would do, you know, they would just dump stuff into the well and try to fill it up and cover it up. They would like, dump couches in there, old furniture.
Health concerns
Lennhoff: The thing that alarmed our attorneys the most is how many people in the neighborhood of all ages had numbness and tingling in their hands and their feet. It wasn’t due to neuropathy from diabetes or something. To them, they saw this as a neurological impact. They explained it is that they had worked with people who worked in factories that produce certain products that used, like benzene and other kinds of similar chemicals in their products and in those workplaces. People’s symptoms would start with numbness and tingling, and that signaled neurological impacts from the exposure.
When they found out how widespread the numbness and tingling was in the neighborhood, they were like, ‘this is not normal.’ There was a whole host of health impacts to people, including weird eye disorders, skin disorders, cardiovascular impacts, really high rates of certain kinds of cancers, including breast cancer, higher than what would be considered normal for a specific population.
We did a health survey of people in the neighborhood, and we found that on Washington Street, north of the site, we found three or four cases of unrelated individuals who had multiple myeloma cancer.
Multiple myeloma is a cancer of the white blood cells, and it’s horrible. It usually doesn’t show up until people are older, even after years of exposure. It might show up when people are like, in their 70s, and it is statistically, not likely to find that many cases of multiple myeloma within a certain size population, and certainly within like a two-block area. We were discovering things that statistically should not be happening to people and it ultimately killed them.
I’ll tell you, on a personal level, there was so much joy in this campaign and so much love, among the people who were organizing together, but then there was also such an incredible amount of sorrow. We lost people who were really, really good. These were people who kept themselves healthy, and they were fit, they were active, energetic people, and they ended up getting sick with cancers or other weird blood and cardiovascular disorders.
CU-CitizenAccess: Why do you think that Ameren does the remediation rather than the Illinois EPA or some government agency?
Lennhoff: I’m sharing this perspective based on conversations we had with the Illinois EPA. Typically, government agencies do not do remediations, but they can force responsible parties to do those remediations. The way the Illinois EPA views it, they give these companies an opportunity to voluntarily declare the site as polluted and then say, “We’re going to clean it up to some extent.” The Illinois EPA is like, “Well, you know, isn’t some remediation better than none?” And that’s like saying “Isn’t a little cancer better than a big cancer?” It’s just not adequate.
When these companies enroll in the voluntary site remediation, they’re the ones who can lay out the plan. They can say, ‘these are the chemicals, and here’s our plan to monitor them and then to remediate them.’ And with Illinois EPA, there’s not a lot of pushback and saying, ‘No, this method of remediation is not adequate. You need to do more.’
Ameren usually got their No Further Remediation letter, which is the clean bill of health, within two years.
They came in quickly, they did little, and then they got their NFR letter. We held their feet to the fire for all these years, and that’s why it took them so long to get to the point where they could start getting these NFR letters. We kept on pushing because we kept on studying the data, looking at the wells that were still coming up hot with these toxic chemicals beyond any safety levels.
CU-CitizenAccess: What did you find in your historical research and in your own testing?
Lennhoff: We did a ton of historical research, and we also worked with Allen Hatheway. He is probably the world’s foremost expert on manufactured gas plants. He has helped map them out around the world. He’s the one who taught us. We met with him in Champaign. He came out one time, and we walked the site and stuff, and he was showing us what to look for.
Some of the results of the contamination were like right there in the ground where you could find them, you know, dried coal tar and different things like that. He explained to us the industry practices of the time. He taught us how we could try to find property records dating back to way back when, especially if we knew the list of the board members of the company. And then we could start making those connections. We would travel to Springfield, Illinois, to do more research and stuff like that.
We would look at the site repository and look at the most recent data on the testing of the wells, and we figured out which wells were coming up hot. And then we would message Ameren and Illinois, EPA saying, “What are y’all going to do about this? This is still coming up hot.” And they did a huge excavation of the site. We did force them to place some wells out into the neighborhood in certain areas, but the placing of the wells is very scattershot.
What testing should look like
Lennhoff: The way that we always explained it is: let’s say you’re trying to find gold, forget about nasty chemicals. You have this spot in the center, like the toxic site, where there’s a bunch of gold, but you don’t know how far out the gold goes, right? So if you want to find the gold, let’s say you could find it through deep wells, where you’re looking at groundwater. You would systematically create a perimeter of wells where you would test for it. And in each direction you would then go further out right and place more wells. And you’d keep placing wells until you get to a point where you’re not finding any more gold, right? And if you do that, then you know all the gold is within this area. Let’s start digging, right? And that’s the way it should work when you’re trying to remediate toxic chemicals.
These chemicals spread over more than a hundred-year period. As the groundwater kept flowing, it kept pushing them out further and further. And of course, the further out you get, the lower the concentration should be. If you want to do a good job for human beings and for the environment, you would try to find where all of it is, and then you would come up with a strategy to remediate it. And they really only remediated the site itself, the Ameren property, and in an area on Fifth Street. They had to dig up some of Fifth Street and do some remediation there. And then there were a couple properties, homes that were really, really contaminated. They ended up buying those properties.
They didn’t necessarily remediate them, as far as I know, but they bought the properties. Why would they buy the properties? They paid way over market rate for these properties. And this was documented in the News Gazette. We did press releases and showed the little houses and their value on Zillow and then showed what Ameren paid for them. The reason that Ameren bought those properties is because in the state of Illinois, under EPA rules, the property owner gets to decide whether they’re going to remediate or not, what kind of remediation they’re going to do, how extensive it’s going to be. And the folly with this method is that it almost pretends like the toxic chemicals obey property lines. And they obviously don’t.
Historical practices of Ameren
Lennhoff: The fact of the matter is, all of these energy utility companies, they reinvent themselves every few years. They’ll spin off, they’ll create a new name for the company, and they’ll act like that wasn’t us. You know, we’re Illinois Power. We didn’t do that back then. That was Illinois Gas and Light, or whatever it was. And Ameren is a creation of Illinois Power.
If they own the property, they can decide how much they are going to remediate or not. It’s important to understand that when the gas plant was operating, the predecessor company that owned the gas plant also owned a bunch of properties throughout the neighborhood. And what used to happen is that when they were producing a whole bunch of physical waste that was like a toxic soup of chemicals. They couldn’t keep that waste on site, coal tar and stuff like that.
What they would do back in the day is the company would have their board members purchase properties throughout the neighborhood in their name, so it didn’t look like it belonged to the company. And then they would with horse and buggy, they would haul some of this coal tar and dump it in these properties. And we don’t know where all the dump sites are, but that’s why certain properties have much higher documented contamination if it’s tested for.
Contamination at Miss Pearl’s Daycare
Lennhoff: One of the places where they did find coal tar was in the backyard of Miss Pearl’s Daycare. Miss Pearl’s Daycare was just north of the site, and when [Ameren] tested in her backyard to get soil samples, the contamination of the coal tar was so extensive that they just shut it down. It was too dangerous to be testing it unless they were going to excavate it. By drilling and getting those soil samples, you’re now creating more exposure.
Her daycare was in the basement, which is like the most dangerous place to have a daycare when you have indoor vapor intrusion. Miss Pearl’s Daycare had babies to infants to young children in the daycare. And it didn’t matter what time of day or night we went there when there were kids there, it was eerily silent. These kids were out of it, and because of those chemicals.
Everybody reacts a little bit differently. My co-worker would feel sleepy and nauseous, whereas I would start getting a headache. I could feel the inside of my mouth like it was coated with something and this would happen even if you couldn’t smell the smell. That’s how I would know personally that something’s not right here.
It was very sad, and my guess is that some of the kids who were there at that daycare are going to grow up with pretty serious health problems, and they’re not going to know why it happened. They’re not going to know that they were exposed.
Champaign County Health Care Consumers testing of Boneyard Creek
Lennhoff: We discovered that through historical research, there was a guy named Ralph Hilscher in 1915 who was commissioned by the City of Champaign to try to discover where The Boneyard Creek would flood. A lot of people’s yards would end up covered with a black tarry substance that smelled bad, it was offensive, it was dirty, it was gross. And back then, industries used to just dump into waterways. So Ralph Hilscher was commissioned by the City of Champaign to figure out what was causing this.
I feel like a kinship with this, with this man from 1915, that he walked the Boneyard Creek. He documented all the pipes coming into the Boneyard Creek from different industries. And he figured out that the manufactured gas plant at the time had laid a pipe that ran along the south edge of the railroad tracks, the old railroad tracks, and it ended in the banks of the Boneyard Creek. And he observed with his own eyes, coal tar just flowing into the Boneyard Creek. When we were trying to get Ameren to expand the area of investigation, the Illinois EPA did not help us with this at all.
We went to a meeting with the Illinois EPA, with our neighborhood leaders, and we presented them with Ralph Hilscher’s report and some reports from these environmental experts we were working with. And we said, ‘We want you to expand the area of investigation to include this pipe, to include the Boneyard Creek, and then the property where, when it would flood, those properties would be affected.’ The Illinois EPA literally told us there is no proof of the existence of this pipe. So we were like we’ll go see if we can find it.
And so my coworker, Grant Antoline at the time, and I bought waders. We had this really beautiful description from Ralph Hilscher, where the pipe exited on the banks of the Boneyard Creek. We climbed down into the Boneyard Creek and I remember telling him, as we were putting on the waders, “We’re going to find that pipe today.” And as soon as we got into the Boneyard Creek, we had to get in from the north of the railroad trust, and then walk under it to come south. As soon as we did that, I spotted it. It even had dried coal tar still, in the formation where it would pour out. We had our investigation supplies, and broke off sections of the pipe, bagged it, put it in our backpack, and then, and then we reported it to the environmental experts we were working with.
They asked us to get, like, coolers, like plastic coolers that could be airtight and, duct tape them closed, and then ship those to them. And then they came. Grant and I went out the next day again. We both definitely got sick for a few days afterwards. Then our environmental experts came out and did testing, and then we threatened to sue the city of Champaign for a violation of the Clean Water Act.
I remember going to a City of Champaign City Council meeting and bringing a section of the pipe and doing a presentation during public participation. I asked them if they wanted to pass it around so they could look at it and smell it. The City of Champaign was forced to remove sections of the pipe. They didn’t remove the whole length of the pipe, and they said there’s no evidence that the pipe still exists. Of course, it exists. It’s probably broken and shattered, which means that whatever contents that were still in there are like the nasty gift that keeps on giving. As groundwater passes over that it’s still going to be spreading that contamination.
CU-CitizenAccess: How do you feel about what could be the finalization of the cleanup efforts?
Lennhoff: I feel very uncertain, because Ameren has not kept us informed as they had pledged to do. And if they’re communicating with the City of Champaign, they have not kept us informed as they had pledged to do. And so I don’t know whether or not they should really be getting these NFR letters.
Unfortunately, the campaign really dropped off after we lost Ebbie Cook, and then M.D. Pelmore and then the pandemic was starting. And so we haven’t really been organizing for quite a while. I try to check in with some of the neighborhood residents I still have contact with, with a couple of the people who had been leaders in the campaign.
I hope to be proven wrong on this, but I don’t really have faith that enough has been done to keep the people of that neighborhood safe from the contamination. Our voluntary site remediation program is not adequate enough when it comes to issues like this.
One of the things that’s really important to highlight with this case is that this is a toxic site in the middle of a residential neighborhood of people who are lower-income who have been disenfranchised through racism. The neighborhood had been grossly neglected by the City of Champaign in terms of dealing with neighborhood flooding, neighborhood infrastructure. The campaign did a lot to start addressing that and making the city work with the neighborhood residents to make positive changes but that long history of neglect and poor infrastructure made people more vulnerable.
If this was happening in an industrial area where people weren’t living right there, then maybe their remediation efforts would be sufficient.
One of the things that we fought for, that people never got, was at minimum, to install vapor mitigation systems in these homes, just like you do for homes affected by radon. It’s a very simple concept. It’s like a pump that draws air from the ground into a pipe. Then the vapors are vented into the outside air, and then they dissipate and spread where they really can’t hurt people. It’s not pretty, but they’re functional, and that would help improve people’s health.
Now, a lot of these homes are rental properties, and landlords don’t want that. They don’t want their home to be seen as polluted. Even though it’s a very simple but elegant solution.
Ameren was really opposed to doing that, because they said they had no proof that there was indoor vapor intrusion. Well, if you purposely do not test for something, you can say there’s no proof of it, right?
At one point we did get the U.S. EPA to test a few homes, and they did find indoor vapor intrusion, but nothing ever came of it.
If there had been a toxic site like this in the middle of Cherry Hills — Cherry Hills is an old wealthy neighborhood in Champaign — I guarantee you there would have been a proper remediation.
CU-CitizenAccess: Will there be any community effort to continue remediation?
Lennhoff: I’m not sure about that. I actually learned about the No Further Remediation letters from you and your professor. I had no idea. So now I’m playing catch up, and I’m going to have to review data.
I need to reach out to my friends in the Fifth and Hill neighborhood, and see what we need to do to address this issue. I certainly haven’t been kept informed by Ameren or the City of Champaign. By now, there’s been so much turnover in the neighborhood that we’ll probably have to go door-to-door again and let people know who are living there that they’re living in a neighborhood with a toxic site. Nobody wants to hear that. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised and see that all the test wells are coming up with acceptable levels of these chemicals. But I just don’t know right now.
CU-CitizenAccess: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
Lennhoff: The fact of the matter is, regardless of what happens here in Champaign, this is an issue for a lot of communities. There are a lot of communities with these former manufactured gas plants where it has been covered up. These are like sleeping giants that are going to wake up in the form of spreading contamination and it’s going to affect people, whether they know that that’s what’s affecting them or not.
They’re not always in residential neighborhoods, but the fact that ours is, it should be horrifying to everybody who cares about environmental health. It should be horrifying to everybody.
It’s one of the historically oldest neighborhoods in the City of Champaign. It started out as a German neighborhood with people who worked on the railroad. And then over time, as people earned more money, they started to move away from the railroads. Then there was the great Black migration from the south, and those were the homes that were affordable. And in a short period of time, it became a historic Black neighborhood. First Street, north of University Avenue, was the Black Business downtown.
People still live there today, and they are residents, and they pay property taxes. Why isn’t the city more invested in their health and their well being?